I recently received an email from GlobalBankingMegaCorp congratulating me on my “new” credit limit increase — said increase no doubt being fueled by the fact that I haven’t charged anything on their poxy card for over six months and have instead been paying down the balance.
Then, lower down, there was this lovely little incentive to spend more with them (note the sting in the tail):
LOL they must think I was born yesterday.
Here’s an interesting take on the whole Bud Light debacle:
“When the company was bought over by InBev, a lot of things changed [from] when it was owned by Anheuser-Busch. You know, it’s an American brand,” the whistleblower remarked.
He explained that the company previously offered many benefits prior to its purchase by InBev. Through the fall in sales for the Bud Light brand, the former employee stated, the corporation could restructure both employee benefits and its company standards through layoffs and renegotiating contracts.
“Bud Light has been failing for many years. We’ve talked about that for many years. The numbers of just, you know, little by little deteriorated. And it feels like they said, ‘Let’s put this nail in the coffin,’” he said. “Now we have a lot of layoffs, a lot of loss in production. It would be easy for them to restructure, let’s say, pay or contracts.”
“It’s too obvious that they wouldn’t just mistakenly do this and not expect these repercussions. Anybody could tell you what was going to happen,” he commented.
Um, maybe. Okay, I’m not so sure about that. In the first place, when it comes to giant corporations, never ascribe to malice what can also be ascribed to stupidity. Sometimes it happens, but that ain’t the way to bet.
The most telling rebuttal to this assertion is quite simple. Regardless of whether Bud Light was in decline, or not, it was still the best-selling beer brand in the United States. And yes, while A-B might have stood to gain from restructuring salary scales or employment contracts, I hardly think that those savings would equate to anything like the amount of money that’s been lost (and will continue to be lost) from their plummeting sales and the equally-dismal drop in their share price. If some toad in Finance suggested this, he needs to be castrated, in the corporate sense, because if even someone like me can see this, then he’s truly stupid.
Regardless of everything else, you just don’t willfully destroy your #1 brand, especially when it’s as large a brand as Bud Light. The sums of money are just too vast, the possible repercussions too dreadful because they’re unknown — the ramifications could see A-B split up as a company into separate operating companies (Michelob, Busch, etc.) and the loss of economies which stem from shared brands would cripple all of them. They’d become no different from a bunch of craft brands — and regardless of what anyone thinks, A-B brands are about as far from craft beers, in both quality and consumer regard, as one could get.
No, the whole thing is just way too Machiavellian and too complex — and trust me, it’s not like InBev is staffed with people of the strategic vision of, say, the German General Staff of WWII, even. They’re a bunch of Belgian and American bureaucrats, a breed not known for their perspicacity. And let’s be honest, the Belgies are among the wokest people on the planet, so I’m more likely to ascribe all this bullshit to simple corporate vanity.
Of course, if I’m wrong and this really was just part of some diabolical Master Plan, I hope it all falls apart and the whole A-B/InBev house comes crashing down. The world will survive and who knows, we might just end up with a few decent beers out of the wreckage.
The Federalist asks the question:
It’s probably more pertinent to start guessing under what pretenses the fucking Fibbies will frame him. Some thoughts:
…and if there aren’t any federal laws addressing some of the above crimes, they’ll invent them.
Oh, this is jolly:
In an unprecedented move, twenty armed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents carried out a raid on a gun store in Great Falls, Montana, seizing all Form 4473 – documents that record buyer’s information during firearms transactions.
“We have now confirmed that both the IRS and the ATF were at Highwood Creek Outfitters in Great Falls around 7 am this morning. Both the IRS and ATF would not say why they were there,” KMON Radio reported.
“A spokeswoman for the IRS would only say they were there on official IRS business. The ATF says it was providing assistance to the IRS. We attempted to enter the store today and were stopped by agents at the door who would only say that the gun store is closed and will reopen tomorrow,” the news outlet added.
Considering that this raid was conducted under the auspices of the fine folks at the IRS, one would question whether the agents needed to confiscate the 4473 forms — which, lest we forget, contain absolutely no financial information.
However, ’tis an ill wind that blows absolutely no good, and there’s this little snippet:
Highwood Creek Outfitters is America’s largest online firearms and accessories mall, according to its website. The store is known for selling what Van Hoose calls “fun guns,” including AR-15’s and AK-47s.
And they did all that despite my never having heard of them before. Sadly, I’m not in a position to give them any business at the moment, but if any of you are thinking of making an online purchase of a gunny nature, you might want to give HSO a look.
As for the Gummint thugs… [taking the Fifth here, Boss]
In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”. Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:
Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home.
Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.
Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.
So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.
…well, not for me, nor for most of my Readers, but this story reminds us why we should never believe what the fucking government tells us:
Michael Shellenberger’s Public today released a blockbuster story, “First Person Sickened By COVID-19 Was Chinese Scientist Who Oversaw “Gain Of Function” Research That Created Virus,” which generously credits Racket. The story cites three government officials in naming scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the “patient zero” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is a major story, contradicting early official explanations pointing to zoonotic cross-species “spillover” at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, colloquially known as the Wuhan wet market. The mystery bat or pangolin suspected of transmitting the disease to humans at that market was never found. The Public story for the first time asserts the source of contamination: a Wuhan Institute scientist fell ill after exposure to a virus engineered at his place of work.
The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises.
So all that bullshit about “markets” and “bats” was just that: weapons-grade
My trust in government was always on the low side, having grown up in a totalitarian society.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that our own American government is, if anything, worse than that.
Trust nobody — and most especially, don’t trust anything the government tells you, when the likely outcome is that they can increase their control over us, with our consent.
Like I said: a life lesson.